Charlie Watts died in 2021

THE Rolling Stones have been making a racket again, insisting on bringing out new material when we were all happy enough with the old stuff.

Of course, the government wants us to work well beyond a pension age of 66 these days, but forcing these septuagenarians-plus to record a new album seems a tad unfair. They’ve done their bit.

Maybe Harrington feels this way because I’ve always regarded the late Charlie Watts as the best Stone.

Why? Watch the footage of the old days and you’ll often see Charlie on the drums bearing the look of a man completely unimpressed by Mick Jagger’s peacock walks and similar tambourine antics.

He bashes away with the drumsticks carrying a doleful look, as if he’s thinking: What do you look like, man?

It’s now more than two years since we lost him, and this week comes reinforcing news that Watts was more thoughtful than your average rock’n’roller.

Auction house Christie’s in Piccadilly begin the sale of his personal book collection today (Friday), including some real rarities.

Some of them will be available for online bids, before the full-blown sale of the really prized tomes on September 28.

Books and manuscripts specialist Mark Wiltshire told the auctioneers’ website: “He used to say how proud he was of having first editions of everything PG Wodehouse wrote. He also had almost every work by Evelyn Waugh and Agatha Christie — all prolific writers, so that is a lot of rare books.

“Nearly every book holds a surprise inside. It has been enormous fun investigating the stories behind the authorial inscriptions.”

He added: “Even if this library had not belonged to a Rolling Stone, it would still be counted the best modern collection to come to auction in the past 25 years.”

The drummer’s collections suggests he liked murder mysteries including the Sherlock Holmes series. He had hunted down a copy of The Hound Of The Baskervilles in which author Arthur Conan Doyle had written inside, a little grumpily perhaps: “I perambulated Dartmoor before I wrote this book.”

Check out the sale catalogue for more gems like that, but make sure you have wads closer to five figures than four if you want to be a bidder.

Harrington doesn’t know about you but, having heard bits of the Stones’ unnecessary new album, Hackney Diamonds, maybe we all might now wish Jagger and the surviving Stones were instead curled up with a good book.